Life discovered in space

Last year, researchers reported evidence of microbes in the upper stratosphere,
and recent tests have apparently confirmed their discovery. Exciting news—the
discovery of life in space—but one question remains: was it life
from space?

The discovery of living creatures at this altitude—25 mi (41 km)—is
truly amazing, but it doesn’t explain all the media attention. The real reason
for the interest is the researchers’ claim that their discovery supports a
way-out hypothesis about the origin of life—‘panspermia.’ This
is the belief that life evolved (and is possibly still evolving) ‘out there’
in the universe, and that the Earth was ‘seeded’ with life some 3.8
billion years ago. In fact, some of its proponents believe that microscopic life
is still periodically carried to Earth in the interior of comets. This hypothesis
was first proposed in detail by the Swedish chemist and Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius
(1859–1927).

First, the facts

According to a press release by Cardiff University’s Centre for Astrobiology
(UK):

‘Several research institutes in India collaborated on a path-breaking project
to send balloon-borne sterile “cryosamplers” into the stratosphere.
… Large volumes of air from the stratosphere at heights ranging from 20 to 41km
were collected on 21 January 2001. … Dr Milton Wainwright of Sheffield University's
Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology … isolated a fungus and two
bacteria from one of the space derived samples collected at 41km. The presence of
bacteria in these samples was then independently confirmed. … The isolated organisms
are very similar to known terrestrial varieties … [but] it should be stressed
that these microorganisms are not common laboratory contaminants.’1

According to a paper printed in FEMS Microbiology Letters,2 the researchers went to great lengths to avoid contamination,
and they displayed ingenuity in coaxing the samples to reproduce. Dr Wainwright
isolated two species of bacteria—Bacillus simplex and Staphylococcus
pasteuri—and one fungus, Engyodontium album. He said that
these species are not typical contaminants, and they’ve never been grown in
the lab where they were isolated.

But the real science stops here.

Now for the rest

When interpreting scientific observations, it’s important first to recognize
the bias of the observer. The press release came from the Centre of Astrobiology,
directed by Chandra Wickramasinghe. He is the one who first proposed the idea of
comets seeding life on Earth, together with Fred Hoyle. It’s not necessarily
wrong to have a bias—both creationists and evolutionists have them; it is
just important to acknowledge the bias upfront.

Wickramasinghe’s bias, however, has led him to conclude far more than is warranted
by the evidence. The discovery of life in space does not tell you where
that life originated. Yet Wickramasinghe boldly told a United Press reporter that
‘the findings support the idea of panspermia, the theory that comets not only
brought the first living microorganisms to Earth 4 billion years ago but that they
must also be doing that at the present time.’3

Here’s the line of reasoning that Wickramasinghe gave the reporter. Finding
microbes like ones on Earth is what his theory ‘predicts,’ he said,
because his theory proposes that Earth’s bacteria evolved from space microbes
in the first place. ‘They’re extremely closely related to known Earth
bacteria but that's what the theory of panspermia predicts,’ Wickramasinghe
explained.4

But in fact, this is also what a much more mundane hypothesis would predict. Namely
that bacteria from Earth were wafted 41 km into space. You would
expect samples in space to be similar to bacteria on Earth. But if you hypothesize
that space-borne bacteria adapted to the Earth’s changing conditions over
billions of years—through countless trillions of bacterial generations, then
you would not expect modern samples from space to be identical to bacteria
on Earth.

As we said in a preliminary report (Life from space?),
something is strange about a claim that it’s more likely for bacteria to come
from distant comets, trillions of km away, than from Earth, 41 km away.5 The data certainly didn’t
lead to this conclusion—it’s something that researchers believed before
they collected any evidence.

Anyway, it could be contamination, after all

Dr Wainwright, who isolated the bacteria and fungus, was honest that there is always
a danger of contamination, even under the best circumstances. Without further research
in space, he can say only that ‘internal logic … points strongly’
to his belief that the bacteria and fungus are not contaminants:

‘Contamination is always a possibility in such studies but the “internal
logic” of the findings points strongly to the organisms being isolated in
space, at a height of 41km. Of course the results would have been more readily accepted
and lauded by critics had we isolated novel organisms, or ones with NASA written
on them! However, we can only report what we have found in good faith.’1

Origin of life—an insurmountable problem

Whether it came from space or from Earth, the origin of the first microorganism
remains a huge problem for evolutionists. In fact, this problem was the motive behind
panspermia in the first place. The modern pioneer of panspermia, Arrhenius, was
also motivated by ‘the failure of repeated attempts made by eminent biologists
to discover a single case of spontaneous generation of life.’6 Francis Crick, a prominent advocate of ‘directed
panspermia’ (deliberate seeding of life by aliens) was also motivated by repeated
failures of ‘chemical evolution.’ As Wickramasinghe explained to space.com,
it is mathematically impossible for life to have evolved on Earth:

‘The emergence of life from a primordial soup on the Earth is merely an article
of faith that scientists are finding difficult to shed. There is no experimental
evidence to support this at the present time.

‘Indeed all attempts to create life from non-life, starting from Pasteur,
have been unsuccessful. Also recent geological evidence indicates that life was
present on Earth over 3.6 billion years ago, at a time when the Earth was being
pummeled by comet and meteorite impacts, and no primordial soup could have been
expected to brew.

‘Not all microbes in interstellar space would survive of course, but the survival
of even a minute fraction of microbes leaving one solar system and reaching the
next site of planet formation would be enough for panspermia to be overwhelmingly
more probable than starting life from scratch in a new location.

‘The odds against microbes surviving such a space journey pales into insignificance
when compared with the insuperable odds against starting life anew in a warm little
pond on the Earth.’7

But Hoyle and Wickramasinghe came to realize that the odds were too improbable even
if the whole universe were a primordial soup. Even the simplest bacteria are far
too complex to have evolved—they must have been created. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe
believed that the creator was within the cosmos, but Genesis makes it clear
who the Creator was, and it tells us that He created all the kinds of life
about 6,000 years ago.

The press release by the Centre of Astrobiology said the same
thing: ‘The new work of Wainwright et al. is consistent with the
ideas of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that in fact predict the continuing input onto
the Earth of “modern” organisms. In recent years and months there has
been a growing body of evidence that can be interpreted as support for the theory
of panspermia—e.g. the space survival attributes and general space hardiness
of bacteria.’ Return to text.

How bacteria could travel so high in the stratosphere is still
an unsolved mystery, since it seems to defy gravity. ‘Possible mechanisms
by which these organisms could have attained such a height’ is one of the
topics covered in the paper that Wainwright et al. published on their experiments.
They argue that no volcanic eruptions had taken place for at least two years before
the samples were taken, and they assert that no meteorological event could explain
the density of bacteria that they believe must be in the stratosphere (if there
was enough for them to find samples in the small area they looked).
Return to text.

Arrhenius, S., Panspermy: the transmission of life from star
to star, Scientific American196:196, 1907.
Return to text.

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